About Gekku Race:
Gekku Race is a fast paced racing game which supports up to 12 players. The narrow race track has been designed for players with fine motor control impairments, putting more importance on players' pedal speed and attack timing than ability to maneuver tight corners.
Players must pedal an exercise bike to move in game and charge their action meter. Additionally, if they are wearing a Bluetooth heart rate monitor the game can determine the effectiveness of their exercise and reward them in game with increased Action Bar charge rate and number of projectiles fired when the Action Bar is used.
The players can choose one of three play styles; the Cashew which stuns other gekkus on contact, the chili pepper which sends other gekkus backwards on contact, or the juice which speeds your gekku up when walking through and slows down opponent gekkus if they try to follow you through the goo.
Development Notes:
As a frequently used game for several of EQUIS Lab’s studies, Gekku Race needed many flexible game modes to be developed that would suit the needs of our various research partner interests.
When Gekku Race was in its early development, gameplay was designed around pedal only as a means to study the player adoption of the concept of pedaling as a source of game input. Gekku speed was left uncapped and players could influence their speed entirely based on how well they performed on the bikes.
In a following study focused on game balance for players with differing motor function levels, we implemented algorithms that would monitor players performance over several weeks of play. The algorithm would establish the players baseline, peak, and optimal sustained pedal speeds and the game would provide a smooth gradient of speeds between these three points. With our core demographic being children with Cerebral Palsy, we wanted to study how best to develop games in a way that these children might be able to play these games in a fair way with their regularly abled family and friends.
In yet another study focused on emphasizing sustained heart rate, we switched the roles of the two exercise monitoring inputs. The Player speed would stay steady at 80% max speed as long as the user was pedaling, unless the game detected the player to be in an optimal heart rate cadence for cardio exercise at which point they could move at greater speeds. The pedal speed was then repurposed to fill the Action Bar more quickly, creating a more tense game.